The Yale Dam Project
Northwestern Electric Company files application for a massive hydro-electric facility on the Lewis River.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Contemplating construction of a $4,000,000 hydro-electric power plant to develop 60,000 theoretic horsepower, an application asking for the entire flow of the north fork of the Lewis River in Clarke and Cowlitz counties was filed by the Northwestern Electric Company of Portland, Ore., with Marvin Chase, supervisor of hydraulics. The name of the project would be the Yale Dam Site. A concrete dam 114 feet high and 490 feet long at the top would impound the water, which would be led through caterpillar gates set in concrete through two penstocks thirteen feet in diameter to the powerhouse.
“A concrete dam 114 feet high and 490 feet long at the top and 110 feet at the bottom would impound the water.”
The Yale Dam was indeed completed in 1953, creating Yale Lake and fundamentally altering the ecosystem of the Lewis River. It remains a critical piece of Pacific Northwest energy infrastructure, sparking ongoing modern debates over salmon migration and dam decommissioning.
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